Shades of Netley Abbey

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Revd Richard Warner, a great partisan of the claims to sanctity of the well in the Abbey crypt, which he seems to have been the first person to have recorded as 'St Joseph's Well'. He was a remarkable character whose father had kept a delicatessen in Marylebone, and who might have had a Naval career before becoming curate to the travel writer William Gilpin and eventually attracting controversy for preaching pacifist sermons during the Napoleonic wars, finishing as the pluralist incumbent of Great Chalfield in Wiltshire and Timberscombe in Somerset. Gilpin - an important figure in early Picturesque travel writing and therefore in the history of the Gothic Garden - was a strong influence on Richard Warner who ended up writing accounts of his own walking tours. Another friend was John Losh, uncle of Wreay church's singular architect Sarah Losh. Warner's extensive literary output (his clerical duties clearly left him plenty of time for this) included reissuing historic cookbooks and antiquarian works as well as gossipy fiction about Bath society. But the work of his that I've just finished reading is his Gothic novel from 1795, Netley Abbey. 

I was intrigued enough by the mention of the novel in Richard Warner's Wikipedia entry to look it up and then buy it. Obviously I knew that what would arrive would not be a pair of 18th-century volumes with thick board covers and marbled endpapers, but I wasn't quite expecting an absolute facsimile, complete with long 's's that look like 'f's, contained in floppy covers and printed so badly that in places the reader has to reconstruct the text. In fact, that, and the inevitable temptation to read it to oneself like Nigel Molesworth's take on Shakespeare ("Fie, fir, if I may fa fo"), are the main pleasures to be derived, because it is difficult to express how bad this book is. The majority of the story is reported speech as characters relate to others what has happened to them in very unlikely prose. There is an impoverished good baron and a very wicked one, dashing knights and an evil abbot presiding over a monastery where a maiden in a white dress (very flimsy, one imagines) is confined to a subterranean chamber. (I know, spoilers, but you're not likely to venture further into this text anyway). This could all be exciting or at least camp fun, but most of the first volume is irrelevant and you virtually know what's going to happen before the plot starts. The main benefit is to get something of a feel for what the book's original 18th-century readers might have experienced: the facsimile reproduction, however faulty, does replicate the typesetting with on average no more than 100 words to each of its 390-odd pages. It does make me appreciate far more the last initial-wave Gothic novel I read, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or, The Moor from 1806, which is itself no great shakes as literature, but at least has some flair to it.

And there is also this question that occurs to me. Although the setting of Netley Abbey is medieval, the world it depicts is, of course, nothing like the actual Middle Ages at all. Neither the castle of good Baron de Villars nor that of dastardly Sir Hildebrand de Warren function anything like a medieval household: they are 18th-century aristocratic establishments projected into the past. The hero young Edward de Villars sniffs at the superstitious monuments of the umbrageous Abbey like a rational Georgian Protestant. Now, given that this book was written by someone who fancied himself as a historian, what did Revd Warner believe the past was actually like? His account of St Joseph's Well in his History of the Abbey of Glaston is highly romantic and coloured, and hardly unsympathetic to the Age of Faith and its monastic institutions which he criticises as a Gothic novelist. It's interesting that the same person can adopt both variant modes when writing in different genres.

Like The Wheels

Every few years at Swanvale Halt church, we go through a process of trying to sort out a new rota for giving lifts to church to congregation members who might need them. This time it’s been Sally our Pastoral Assistant who has with some degree of annoyance asked to put an appeal on the notice sheet for help, because the list of lifters has shrunk until it’s basically her. She is not the first driver to whom this has happened, and it’s one instance of the general phenomenon in churches, and I suspect in voluntary organisations more widely, that once one person shows an aptitude or willingness to do a particular task, everyone else is happy to step back and let them do it. To be absolutely fair, this is almost always because they are themselves doing half a dozen other tasks as well, but then so is the victim.

I warned Sally that the likelihood was that nobody would volunteer. There is only a handful of people who need lifts to church, but there’s also only a handful of people in a position to offer them. You wouldn’t have thought this very basic act of Christian service should be hard to arrange, but it is. People’s individual preferences and circumstances need negotiating around – absences to see family members, a desire to stay for coffee after the service or a positive preference not to, for instance – and while it ought to be possible for grown-up people to compromise, it adds effort to what’s already the effortful decision to go to church in the first place. Elderly and less able souls may decide at the last minute that they don’t feel up to coming after all, while drivers, most of whom are themselves elderly and not that able, may be hesitant about taking on responsibility for people who are even more liable to fall over. Parking in the centre of the village is very difficult – only today Sally found herself parking so far away that her car was probably equidistant between the church and her house. Finally, everyone who can give a lift is cramming in several other church-related tasks, as well as trying to fit in family commitments and so on. For instance, I could take people home after the service, but I can’t take people there because I absolutely have to be on time, at least twenty minutes before we’re due to begin, and even then I sometimes have baptisms which rule out any possibility of giving lifts home.

At one extreme of the liftees is Roland. Roland has learning difficulties and lives a good half-mile from the church, but doggedly walks to us for 10am, week in, week out, in a jacket and tie. The other week he wrote me a letter, referring to himself, as he does, in the third person: ‘When Roland is old Roland won’t be able to come to church’. He already is old, of course, so in Sally’s absence I took him home for two weeks, in the first case going home to get my car, and in the second parking, as I’ve said, some distance away (driving, parking, and walking took exactly the same amount of time as if I’d merely walked). I’ve spoken to Roland’s care providers who think they can probably rejig their Sunday duties so they can at least bring him to us.

At the other pole of difficulty we find Edna. Edna lives near one church member but for obscure reasons I prefer not even to know about would rather not have a lift from them, so it was Andrew and Sheila who brought her to church before they moved. On one occasion they were en route when she asked to divert to the Post Office. Andrew pointed out that he was churchwarden at the time, while Sheila was sidesperson that morning, and leading the intercessions, and they were both on tea duty which meant they had to get to church as soon as they could. Edna did not get her trip to the Post Office, much apparently to her chagrin. The situation was compounded by the knowledge that, unlike some members of the church, Edna is well able to get a taxi if she chose to – which is exactly what my Mum does. My Mum, in fact, lives no less than three miles away from the church she attends, though she usually gets a lift home from a very kind lady whose house is nowhere nearby, and the cost of a taxi is a significant sacrifice, rather more so than it would be for Edna.

Of course, time was that when you couldn’t walk to church, you didn’t come to church and that was it. The Lord of the Manor was unlikely to send a pony-and-trap to pick you up from the parish’s far-flung parts. Thinking back to +Rowan’s talk the other night, I wondered whether this might be an opportunity not just to take communion to people in their homes in lieu of them attending in person, but have ‘communion services to which they can invite their families and friends’, as he said. It could be a real chance for mission – if only what Rene didn’t want, as well as the Sacrament, was tea and a chat with Queenie, and vice versa (though Edna doesn’t want tea with anyone).

This Sunday, Sally told me that she had indeed spoken to a couple of souls who might be able to offer the odd lift, provided the liftees were flexible and realistic. Good, I thought. There’s the rub, though; or one of the rubs.

O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.